THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

ailments of body or mind. For this poison of moral and intellectual despair which is creeping through a sad world's veins, what cheerier antidote is within reach than the living tide of health, and hope, and simplicity, and hilarity, the breezy objectiveness and stoutness of muscle, and ardour of emotion, which flows full and warm through the heroic myths of the men of Erin? If the world is content to go as far as Norway for a new proof of how wicked and unhappy human nature can make itself, why not also go to Ireland to hunt the wild woods of Ben Gulban with Finn's mighty men, to see the golden towers of the Tir Tairngire glittering on the western wave, to participate in the glorious carouse of the Fair of Carman, or to live again the charmed life of the post-Christian days, when the vesper bells of saints sang the quiet valleys to their rest, and the welcome of kings laughed merrily out upon the stranger in the night?

The Celtic spirit is the saving salt of a materialistic age. Celtic hearts in our own days have carried the fire of divine faith into the depths of the New World as bright as the night it was kindled by Patrick on the Hill of Slane. As with the supernatural, so with the intellectual ideals, sympathies, blemishes, and virtues of the race. They retain their pristine sincerity and their incommunicable glow. Now, if there is anything clearer than that Celtic ideals do not find satisfaction in the English tongue—that they, so to say, feel an alien chill and discomfort in their English garb—it is that they, on the contrary, experience a feeling of kinship in the Irish language and in the old Irish lore, such as a man might experience at sight of the turf smoke curling out of his native cabin by some fairy-haunted Irish rath after wandering among the splendours of foreign cities. If there … continue reading »

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Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (also onKindle) is an American widow’s account of her travels in Ireland in 1844–45 on the eve of the Great Famine. Sailing from New York, she set out to determine the condition of the Irish poor and discover why so many were emigrating to her home country. Mrs Nicholson’s recollections of her tour among the peasantry are still revealing and gripping today. The author returned to Ireland in 1847–49 to help with famine relief and recorded those experiences in the rather harrowingAnnals of the Famine in Ireland (Kindle version here).

Annals of the Famine in Ireland is Asenath Nicholson's sequel to Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger. The undaunted American widow returned to Ireland in the midst of the Great Famine and helped organise relief for the destitute and hungry. Her account is not a history of the famine, but personal eyewitness testimony to the suffering it caused. For that reason, it conveys the reality of the calamity in a much more telling way. The book is also available in Kindle.

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